Upwork proposal 2016-11-07: Website renewal & CMS to update/maintain
Please check my / my team job history and http://codeyourdream.com/featured-projects
One of the most interesting relevant examples is aruba.com - we've been maintaining and developing this website for a couple of years. It's a rather complex multi-language Drupal website, and the customer is Aruba Tourism Authority - the head tourism organization of Aruba.
Our tasks in a typical project include:
- detail-oriented careful requirements analysis
- technical consulting
- project management
- actual web development (both back-end and front-end)
- testing & debugging
- support and maintenance
We can provide graphic design services, but that's not our main specialty, and for custom graphics we usually refer to our partners. Recently the trend are so that customers have in-house graphic designers or prefer to use themes (web front-end components) from theme marketplaces.
Anyway, whatever look you prefer, we can manage that.
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Hello,
I am the leader of Code Your Dream - a team of professional web developers located in Russia. For several years we've been in the top 1% among all other software developers on Elance/Upwork.
We have rich experience in building websites from scratch, supporting and improving complex websites, and I'm sure we'll be a right fit for this project.
I read your RFP document. Since there's not much to write at this level of detail, please allow me to reply in Upwork message instead of a Word or PowerPoint document. I believe it's going to be easier for you - will save at least 10 seconds of your time.
The requirements you listed should definitely be discussed and revised. Overall, everything is doable, but we need to clarify everything, because currently the requirements are mixed between business, technical and content requirements. We should sort this all out, and make technical requirements follow the business needs.
For example, you mentioned "HTTP compression with GZip", and we can definitely implement this, but this may not make sense. I guess your initial business requirement is to have pages load as quickly as possible, and there are certain mechanisms for that like caching (which you also mentioned), proxies, CDNs. You should tell us what you need as a site user, visitor and administrator, and we'll find the best modern approaches to implement that.
Another example of something we should discuss is "no side white columns". Although this is something we can definitely implement, this is not a common practice for such websites, and for a good reason. On wide monitors it's hard to read things on the very right and on the very left of the screen. There should be a wise balance between trying to use all of the space and not overcrowding / making it hard to read.
As for the CMS for this project, we'd definitely recommend Drupal. It's more advanced and scalable, and seems to be a better option for a multi-language portal like this.
Some more notes on your document:
> should be SSL secured
Overall, it's rather easy to implement. You just need a certificate and the web server configured to use SSL.
But it doesn't make much sense if you're not going to pass some sensitive data like credit cards, some private information, etc. Again, this depends on your needs, which are not quite clear at this moment.
I'd love to discuss your needs in detail.
The overall process that I see is:
1. We discuss your requirements and elaborate the project documentation.
2. After that we elaborate the project plan and fixed price quote.
3. Then we start the milestone-based development with acceptance after the completion of each milestone.
The rough quote at this point can only be a guess.
I can definitely tell the lower bound of the effort required to build such a project.
If you need a fully custom theme based on custom graphic design, it will take at least 2 - 3 man/months (320 - 480 hours) to implement such a site.
As I mentioned in the answer to your question, we noticed that currently customers often prefer to buy responsive themes on marketplaces like themeforest or templatemonster, and then adapt them to their needs. This could significantly save time and budget, and if you choose this approach, the actual effort may be 1-2 man/months less.
1 man/month = $X according to our rate for long-term projects (plus Upwork fees).
Just based on our experience, the rough total quote for this kind of project would be 3-5 man/months, which is 3*$X - 5*$X. But this is a preliminary quote, of course.
Now, some more notes:
> Please include cost for “Writing for the web” and helping on content
We don't do writing for the web usually, but we can recommend a couple of good writers with rates about $Y per 500 words article.
> Please include SEO/SEM and KPIs follow-up services you would offer onwards once the website
is live, even though if designed well we should see improvements on SEO organically.
The real "organic" SEO is based on unique content you provide to your visitors. We don't do content work, but we provide you the tools to deliver great content.
> Please include hosting, per month, detailing if mutual or dedicated server.
Just based on our and our customers' experience, we'd recommend using Amazon hosting. We are not hosting resellers, so you can check this directly: https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/ (they have a pretty complex pricing model though).
> Please mention TMA maintenance cost per year following the renewal project (including maintenance of CMS – regular updates, etc, as well as maintenance if any issue arises).
This strongly depends on the volume of work required. Basic security updates and minor fixes shouldn't require more than 10 hours per month. This would be $Z/month. But we can also discuss this: you may need less or more support.
Oh, this proposal appears to be longer than I expected :-)
So I'm looking forward to hearing from you!